


Right Up Until She Isn't (The First Time)

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Series: a woman who calls herself Karen [1]
Category: Daredevil (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Assassin!Karen, Black Widow!Karen, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-23
Updated: 2015-07-23
Packaged: 2018-04-10 18:45:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4403072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the woman who calls herself Karen Page lies about almost everything, except for what she doesn't, and is quiet and sweet and gentle, right up until she isn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Right Up Until She Isn't (The First Time)

**Author's Note:**

> So...this happened. This is pretty much the first piece of fanfiction I've ever written in my life. It isn't edited and I wrote it in a couple hours while watching TV, so. Yeah. I might do a sequel of Karen explaining everything to the boys.
> 
> 7/23/15: There is now a sequel.

The man sitting across the table is handsome, in a crisp and cold sort of way—expensive white shirt, fine blue suit, pricey watch, all part of the image.  She can appreciate this, even as he threatens her life and her…friends.  She has friends to threaten, now, Foggy and his soothing touch when she’s tired, Matt and his brittle smile like lines of headstones in a Catholic graveyard.  Of all the developments in her life now, that is easily the strangest.

She plays the damsel, plays it straight to the hilt just like she always does, tears in her eyes and a faint tremor in her voice as she spits words at him, and he swallows it, buys it—lock, stock, and barrel.  Even when her hand lashes out and she seizes the gun, letting it shiver as if unused to the weight, the man looks downright condescending.     

“Do you really think I would put a loaded gun on the table where you could reach it?” he asks, barely avoiding a sneer, and if she was anyone else, that ploy might work.  But the gun rests heavy in her hands, fingers coiled around the grip and the trigger, and if he can’t tell that they belong there, then maybe he wouldn’t have meant to put a loaded gun where she could reach it after all.

“I don’t know,” she says, and she sounds hollow as the winter wind rushing through alleys.  She didn’t want to do this anymore, but the worst part is that she _does_ want it, she didn’t realize until just this moment how much she missed the rush.  She thinks she might be starting to remember just what it is that she misses.  “Do you really think this is the first time I’ve shot someone?”

The man sighs at what he thinks is bravado, and starts to stand up.  He doesn’t know that this is what she does.  She is quiet and sweet and gentle right up until she isn’t.

The woman who calls herself Karen Page has lied about many things in her life.  Sometimes she thinks she’s lied about everything, from the color of her hair to her criminal record to her name.

She’s not lying tonight.

The gun bucks in her hands and she absorbs the recoil like it’s nothing, like it’s the beat of her heart in her chest, as seven bullets find their home behind his crisp, white shirt and crisp, cold facade.

 

_Do you really think this is the first time I’ve shot someone?_

 

When she was four, she had another name that she has since forgotten, but she remembers that she lived in an apartment with her mama who brushed her long red-gold hair and sang, and her papa who spoke rarely but smiled often, and her new baby brother, Marcus.  She adored them, and she wanted to take ballet, and she wanted to be a princess when she grew up. 

Those dreams burned like butterfly wings at a bonfire when the man broke in.  She would never know who he was or why he was there, but she would remember that she hid when her mama told her to and held her breath until she thought she would die.  It was morning by the time someone walked through the wreckage of her life, a man, and took her by the hand.

It didn’t matter that she protested, loud and bold and sharp in her terror.  She was taken away and made into something new.

 

_Do you really think this is the first time I’ve shot someone?_

 

When she was eight, she was named Vasilisa, and she slept handcuffed to a bed surrounded by the others.  The others were all she knew, their slender forms slamming through fighting practice and their smooth faces learning lie in deed as well as word and their carefully-soft hands cradling the butts of guns and their lean arms upraised in one graceful ballet position after another.  But they weren’t friends and she knew it, even though she didn’t quite recall ‘friends’.  They were the opponents, and they knew it.  Yelena broke three of Vasilisa’s fingers in fighting practice last week, but it was nothing compared to the massive trauma that Natalya doled out almost daily.  They were lucky, fortunate, _blessed_ to have their gifts to protect them from one another, their gifts of strength and speed and healing and resilience.  Their superiors were so good to grant them their gifts, and even though Vasilisa knew she would never be as good as Yelena, who would never be as good as Natalya, she remained determined to be worthy.

Vasilisa was good at both hand-to-hand combat and ranged fighting, not spectacular, but good.  She was good as seduction, good at stealth, but what she was best at was being quiet and sweet and gentle, right up until she wasn’t.  Sometimes she was even complimented by their instructor in their espionage classes, the way the Soldier sometimes complimented Natalya in combat.  She cherished it, but she never risked mentioning it out loud or letting her face show her pleasure.  Asya had blushed when the Soldier nodded at her aim with a rifle.  When Asya was returned to them four days later, she didn’t know any of them, by face or name.  So Vasilisa was quiet and good and she listened to anything they would tell her.

 

_Do you really think this is the first time I’ve shot someone?_

 

When she was twelve, her name was Anya and she was on her first mission.  It went flawlessly, and she brought back even more information than her superiors asked for, because she was quiet and sweet and gentle right up until she wasn’t.

For a few minutes, as she struggled back to Vasilisa, she felt like the tack of blood was still clinging to her hands.  But the rare, wide smile that her teacher bestowed on her washed her soul like a hot bath, and she gave a thin, thin smile in response.

 

_Do you really think this is the first time I’ve shot someone?_

 

When she was sixteen, her name was Vasilisa again and there were only four of them left, out of the original twenty-eight.  There was Galina, with her heavy eyelids and full figure, and there was Yelena, all icy eyes and icy smile, and there was Natalya, shards and shards of broken glass all pressed together into something lethal, and there was her.  She killed three of the others with her own two hands, and set Natalya against two others, to be ripped apart when those awful shards tore into them.  She sat and listened to Inna’s concerns and Kseniya’s fears as the others started to die out, quiet Vasilisa, too sweet for the cruel games of the Red Room, gentle as they fretted.  And she hoarded and hid their secrets until she had enough to catch them when they were alone and leave their bodies cooling on the floor.

The last one was Irina, and the two of them were set alone in the training room.  Whoever survived, they were told, would be one of the last four candidates, the victorious few who would be prepared to truly serve their country.

Irina came at her like a wild animal, and Vasilisa let herself be beaten ruthlessly into the corner of the room.  She even let herself cry, tears on her cheeks for the first time in years, until Irina was standing over her and laughing viciously.

Vasilisa lunged to her feet in a blur and ripped out Irina’s throat.

 

_Do you really think this is the first time I’ve shot someone?_

She started losing track of her age after that.  Time spun on in a cloud of names, her own and others, and she had only the vaguest impression that the torture she had suffered after killing Irina stopped her from spinning on with it properly.  Galina had died at some point, but the woman who was sometimes called Vasilisa barely remembered how she had known her.  There was a Soldier who appeared sometimes, a vaguely familiar stranger, and did missions with Natalya, who was still a thousand shards of glass in the shape of a woman.  Yelena was still second-best, bitter as winter ice at Natalya’s casually superior performance.  And Vasilisa was still sent out when they needed someone to play the perfect damsel.

The thing was…the thing was.

She thought that her superiors might have bought her personae a little better than she intended.

When she heard whispers that Natalya had failed to return because she had been taken from the Red Room by SHIELD, she didn’t hear ‘stolen.’  She heard ‘escaped,’ and she began to draw slow connections that she didn’t dare speak aloud. 

One did not escape from a caring home.  One escaped from a prison.  A colosseum.

When she killed her handler with a knife to the spine and cut out her tracking implant from under the skin of her forearm, she relished the knowledge that they had believed her to be quiet and sweet and gentle, and she wondered whether even Natalya had ever dreamed that she wasn’t.

 

_Do you really think this is the first time I’ve shot someone?_

 

When she decided that she was twenty-eight, she put on a new accent and a new pair of heels and chose a new name for herself.  Karen was a nice name, she decided, and most importantly it sounded nothing like any of the others at the Room.  Her superiors had possessed the benevolence to teach her the most up-to-date technological skills they could—no, it hadn’t been benevolence, she reminded herself, it made her _useful_ to them.  So Vasi— _Karen_ went out and used her skills as a product of the Black Widow program and got a fake set of ID and a plane ticket to New York, where surely she could hide herself in the millions of people surging through the streets.  Karen was like a warm coat, something all hers, and it was nothing to sink herself into the persona.

She realized, glorying in the freedom to do exactly what she wanted, even with something as minor as the decorations on her walls, that she had never seen the chains wound around her until they were gone.

 

_Do you really think this is the first time I’ve shot someone?_

 

When she was, as far as the world was concerned, twenty-nine, she wished that she could say that waking up covered in blood next to a body was novel, that she was exactly as quiet and sweet and gentle as her coworkers thought she was.  The only novel thing about this, though, was that she knew she hadn’t done it.

She would never be so messy.

She didn’t say that, of course, when the blind lawyer and his friend-cum-partner came in.

She realized when the man broke into her apartment that she had let herself sink _too_ deeply into Karen, into the false identity of the normal woman.  She would have to fix that.

 

_Do you really think this is the first time I’ve shot someone?_

 

So when the man in the blue suit threatens her life, she ends his, and the shakes are not from realizing what she’s done, but rather from remembering all the people she’s been.

After that, things happen very quickly.  Suddenly, Wilson Fisk is gone, eradicated by the masked man, the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, the wandering vigilante who saved her life when she was too tangled up in her selves to do it.  Foggy and Matt, still determinedly glad to have taken her in even if they’re keeping a secret from her, are fixing whatever was wrong between them, and the Daredevil has a new suit.

This last she knows personally.  He comes to save her again when she’s attacked, attacked _again_ because muggers like to go for quiet and sweet and gentle girls.  They’re easy targets.  Right up until they’re not, she supposes as she readies herself for the fight.

This time, he takes on her three attackers and, as soon as the first one turns his back, she is on him like a lioness, thighs clenched around his throat as she uses her weight to bring him to the ground and snap his neck like paper.  She takes the gun from his body and puts one bullet at home in a thigh, another in a shoulder.  Her heart beats, once, twice, as the weapon jumps minutely in her palms.

“Hands up and on your knees,” she spits, gun rock-steady in her hands, “or I’ll kill you.”  They sneer at her, clutching their wounds, and she bares her teeth right back, and the Daredevil’s jaw is loose in shock.

The one she shot in the shoulder moves aggressively toward the Devil’s baton, and she shoots him twice in the throat.  His friend, spattered with blood and sinking to the ground in horror, seems content to bleed out quietly on the pavement.

“Karen?” the Daredevil’s voice asks, and she knows that voice, all Catholic reverence and bitter cynicism and desperation.  She strides over to him, kicking the wounded man in the leg to make him black out, and she narrows her eyes at him.

“Matt?”  He nods slowly and she sighs.  “I really want to be mad at you for this,” she informs him despairingly.

“You have _no_ grounds to be angry.  What…how…”  He gestures vaguely at the men on the ground and she is having _such_ explicit words with him about how he can do that despite being blind.  She knows most people would initially assume he had fooled them, but she is Karen and Vasilisa and Anya and so many others and she is a daughter of the Red Room and she is not so easily fooled.

“I suppose we both have some secrets it may be time to share,” she admits, cleaning the gun and tossing it onto the man with the bloodied leg.

“Who are you?” he asks, and yes, that’s fair, she’s been asking herself that for a long while now.  “ _What_ are you?”  And in their new world, full of gods and monsters and heroes and vigilantes and madmen with katanas, that’s fair too.

She thinks she might have an answer now.  “My name is Karen Page.  I chose it for myself.  And I am quiet and sweet and gentle, right up until I’m not.”  She actually smiles, a thin, thin smile.  “After all,” she says, looking down at the carnage she has left in her wake, “do you really think this is the first time I’ve shot someone?”


End file.
